IX.—Clinical Uses of Albumin

Abstract

Plasma fractionation has provided a number of materials which may be used to treat conditions in which whole blood would be of little or no value. It was in 1944 that Cohn and his co-workers published a series of papers on plasma fractionation (Cohn et al. 1944) and in the same year Janeway and his colleagues first suggested the use of albumin in hypoproteinaemic states (Janeway et al. 1944). Since then many accounts of the treatment of generalised oedema have mentioned the employment of salt-poor albumin as an adjunct to therapy (Chamberlain et al. 1966; Garnet and Webber 1967; Silverberg and Kjellstrand 1968; Snashall 1971), but no attempt has been made recently to evaluate the place of albumin in such patients.